Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last person standing in the floppy disk business

eyeondesign.aiga.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–363 of 363 posts

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#361

Post by throwanem »

devilbunny wrote: post #197
zelphirkalt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if magn…

You can format a Hi-MD for data. It's very slow by modern standards, especially in random access, and the media is so rare and thus costly there's no point except for the sake of it - I only have one, and at $60 a pop I wouldn't have any except that the seller I bought my MZ-RH1 from forgot to check if a disc was in it before shipping. But it works.

A modern development of that technology would have greater capacity, sure, but I can't imagine how it would approach the low random-access latency of solid-state media.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#362

Post by romwell »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #344
romwell wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who is the arbiter of language that decides which usage is silly and clunky ? Usage is usage. What is clunky and silly is complaining against language that is perfectly clear and understandable, whatever words it uses.

I guess the people who prefer the original by a factor of 30-1 are the arbiters.

That's some circular logic right here, mate.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#363

Post by gattilorenz »

toast0 wrote: post #179
gattilorenz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive, easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware. Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :) [1] https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy

> Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :) Well, LS-120 were available in ATAPI, which is at least IDE adjacent, if you don't want to call it IDE.

Iomega’s stuff was also available in SCSI and USB (and possibly firewire) variants, but probably not on industrial machinery, and it’s hardly a prototypical floppy… we’re stretching definitions here
Post reply on HN